Banana-Date Scones
Yessssssssssssss!
And this, from a non-scone-fan.
When I hear the word "scone," I think of choking down dry crumbles of floury mass, tempered only by slatherings of dairy and jam. I guess that's probably what scones are: an excuse to eat clotted cream or butter and sugary fruit spreads.
Well, that all stops here. These are moist and delicious - no toppings necessary! And they are sweetened only with nature's candy, no white sugar here! Dates, bananas, and brown rice syrup provide all the sweetness these scones need.
I do not enjoy eating dates out of hand, but I sure do like them in breadstuffs! It's a bit of a chore to chop the sticky little mothers, but it's strangely fun and satisfying to toss the pieces in flour to separate them.
I didn't have rice milk on hand, but I did have coconut milk (not the canned Thai kind but rather the soy milk kind) which acquitted itself nicely.
Typo alert: Listed in the ingredients following the spices is 1/2 teaspoon salt, however in the directions, there's no mention of salt. I put it in anyway with the spices, and I think the typo is that it was omitted in the directions.
These are so easy to make and couldn't be more delicious. I ate one still warm (yum) and then I tried one that had cooled down (also yum). Then the next day I tried another one per I&T's suggestion, split and toasted with vegan margarine (extra yum). I've shared them with two friends who've also given big thumbs up.
Now, I know I just said how great these are, but I want to talk about something that I'm finding is affecting my experience of all of the baked goods in this book. As wonderful as they all taste while you're eating them, I can't help noticing that they all leave me with a similar aftertaste, one that I don't experience with non-vegan baked goods. It's a chemical kind of taste, which leads me to think it might be the baking soda and/or powder. And that makes me wonder... Might there be something in eggs that somehow masks or absorbs this chemical taste? Anyone who's also found this aftertaste or has any knowledge of this phenomenon, please weigh in!
SFO: 10
Hummus with Caramelized Shallots
You would think that by combining the deliciousness of hummus with the deliciousness of caramelized shallots, you'd create this amazing superfood that would conquer the world with its nuclear deliciousness.
And yet, I fear this is a case of diminishing returns. What I love about hummus, the interplay between creaminess and salt and tartness, is overwhelmed by the sweetness and unctuousness of the shallots.
Don't get me wrong, it's edible. I'm eating it. It's not going to waste. But is this preferable to plain old hummus? I say no.
SFO: 10
Hummus with Roasted Garlic
Yikes, I blew this one.
I roasted some garlic just for the occasion, but then when I was actually putting together the hummus, I added too much fresh garlic, and now the hummus is too garlicky!
I think I&T's suggestion of 2-3 cloves of garlic is way off. I think one small clove of fresh garlic would be plenty. And I knew this going in, but I forgot, and in went 3 cloves. And now all that beautiful roasted garlic is buried under the clobbering weight of 3 fresh cloves. I should have left out the fresh garlic entirely.
I may have to try this one again....
SFO: 10
(As long as you both eat it...)
Tonight was Book Club, aka Jeff's Book and Cook Club. See, after I cooked my way through Martha's book, I missed the constant dinner parties and entertaining, so I invited a bunch of friends to be a part of a book club for which I would provide meals inspired by whatever we just read. And here we are over two years later, celebrating our 18th selection/dinner together.
Notice I didn't say "book" in that last sentence, because tonight was a Wild Card dinner. After every eighth book, we have a Wild Card selection, i.e. something that doesn't fall into one of the categories we regularly cycle through, namely: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Epic (anything over 500 pages), and Classic (anything published before 1965). For example, our first Wild Card entailed reading a month's worth of The New Yorker. Tonight's Wild Card selection entailed watching four specific Woody Allen movies.
I know, I know, it's not a book. It's not even a magazine. It didn't involve reading in any shape or form, but it was what the group voted for, so tonight we had Chez Woody with a meal inspired by those four movies. It was a decidedly un-vegan meal, but I did manage to incorporate four recipes from the book!
Our cocktail hour brought The Annie Hall-way of Finger Foods, mostly non-vegan selections, descriptions of which I will spare you, but I did include what I called Self-Hatred Hummus, as a nod to Woody's line in the film that sums up his basic ideology: "I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member."
Roasted Red Pepper Hummus
I hate bell peppers. Unless I'm forgetting something, they're the only food I absolutely despise. I can smell, taste, sense them a mile away. If a pepper passes over a pot while it's cooking, the whole dish is tainted for me. It's not just a taste thing, it's also an indigestion thing: bell pepper is the awful taste that keeps on giving.
And if you know anything about this book, you know that it is positively RIDDLED with bell peppers. So how am I going to handle this? Like any good, self-hating, rule-following Jew, I'm going to prepare all the recipes verbatim, even those with the dreaded peppers. Hopefully, there will be people around me to enjoy them. I will taste everything, but chances are 99.9% that anything with peppers will not get a second bite from me. (FYI, this doesn't apply to jalapeño or serrano or any chile peppers. Those I'll eat.)
That's why I dubbed this dip Self-Hatred Hummus. Because I would never want to eat it. But other people did, and evidently it was fine. That's Adinah posing with it above.
SFO: 10
Poppy Seed-Cornmeal Roti
The first course was inspired by the film Crimes and Misdemeanors, which is a film almost completely devoid of food and food references. In one scene, Woody and Mia are eating take-out Indian, and he jokes, "How's the Tandoori Mouse?" So in a desperation move, I went Indian for this course. I made this Carrot Pachadi recipe and served it with the Poppy Seed-Cornmeal Roti.
Poppy Seed-Cornmeal Roti is the recipe that ate my afternoon. It's not that it's so hard, it's just time-consuming. I hadn't done the math, but if you're making ten of something that needs to be cooked for 3-4 minutes on both sides, that's 60-80 minutes of cooking time! And that doesn't even include the painstaking process of brushing and folding and sprinkling of crumbs and multiple rollings that these require. Oy.
And to add insult to injury, after all that work, I think I must have made one or more very big mistakes here. While the flavors were really nice (though could've been saltier... I know, broken record), the rotis were tough and dried out, not even remotely "soft, flaky, buttery" as described.
Here are my guesses for where the bad turn happened: 1) I rolled them too thin. 2) My pan was too hot. 3) I didn't wrap them or reheat them well. 4) I over-kneaded them to begin with. 5) I increased the recipe by 50%.
1) I saw the instruction to roll into "as thin a circle as possible" and went for it.
2) In retrospect, I realize I should've turned the flame down when I saw the big black spots forming on the breads. I mean, little black spots are good, but big ones? My bad.
3) I wrapped them in a damp dish towel as they were being made, and rewarmed them tightly wrapped in foil, all as directed, but I think the damage may have been done already.
4) I let my KitchenAid mixer knead for me (with the dough hook). And maybe I let it go on too long. 5-6 minutes of kneading by hand might not mean 5-6 minutes of machine kneading.
5) Upping the recipe by 50% should have set me up for 12 small rotis. What I got were 10 very large rotis. This makes me think #1 is at least one of the culprits.
Also, I assert that there's a typo in here. It has to do with the oil. The recipe calls for 2 tablespoons in the crumbs part of the recipe, plus more for brushing. However, there is also an instruction in the recipe to coat the just-kneaded roti dough in a tablespoon of oil before it rests. I think that that tablespoon is meant to be factored into the 2 tablespoons that it appears are meant to go into the crumbs.
Here's the problem: when you add 2 tablespoons of oil to the crumbs ingredients, you don't get crumbs, you get paste. If it were 1 tablespoon to coat the dough ball, and 1 tablespoon for the crumbs, I think the crumbs would end up with the right, crumby consistency.
And should I even address the ludicrous "typo" that says these take
30 minutes? Simply cooking 8 rotis takes between 48-64 minutes, and that
doesn't include assembling the ingredients (5m), kneading (5m), resting
time (10m minimum), and rolling and folding and brushing and crumbling
(1,000,000m). Even if you roll out the next roti while you're cooking the last one, you will need to set aside about an hour and a half for this recipe. Trust me.
As for the taste, delicious. Even tough and dried-out, my book club buddies enjoyed this. That's my cousin Harriet nibbling on one.
SFO: 10
(I'm not going to punish this recipe for my own mistakes. If made well, I'm sure anyone would be happy to eat them.)
Mashed Spiced Sweet Potatoes
The main course got its inspiration from Hannah and Her Sisters, which begins and ends with two consecutive Thanksgiving dinners. There's a no-brainer!
Mashed sweet potatoes always have a place on the Thanksgiving table! As for I&T's take on them, it's easy, straightforward, traditional even. The only thing distinguishing these from your average Thanksgiving side dish is the absence of butter (enter vegetable oil). Very tasty, and a good candidate for making ahead. Reheats well.
SFO: 10
(Even Tracy ate it!)
Holiday Cranberry Sauce
One of my favorite Thanksgiving ingredients is fresh cranberries. I was so excited to see that they were still available in the stores. I was curious to try this recipe because of the agar addition. I've never used a thickening agent for cranberry sauce, but it must be because there's more liquid (apple cider) and less sugar than your typical versions.
Warning: watch this pot carefully! Evidently apple cider with agar in it really loves to boil over. It happened to me twice!
As for the taste, good. The apple cider doesn't change the flavor profile too much. The cranberries dominate. The agar doesn't seem to bind this a whole heck of a lot. It was soupier than my traditional version. Ultimately, not preferable, but fine. Annie liked it.
SFO: 10
(It's safe to serve to anyone, but I won't be using this recipe come Thanksgiving.)
P.S. Dessert was a non-vegan French Apple Cake inspired by Midnight in Paris. I almost made the Apple Galettes from the book, but I thought it might be too much to take on....
Israeli Couscous with Pistachios and Apricots
I was going to make this for my friend Marcy the other day, but we ended up going out to dinner, so I'm making it today to justify the bunch of fresh mint I bought for the occasion.
These are nice flavors, interestingly combined. I used whole wheat couscous, Israeli of course. The finished dish is fragrant and tasty, not a life-changer, but good. The standout flavor is the chopped mint garnish, standing out in a good way. Again, I crave more salt.... What's wrong with me??
SFO: 10
(Nothing weird or scary here. Just a nice side dish.)
A Hummus Recipe
That's what it's called: "A Hummus Recipe."
As I mentioned a few days ago, I've upgraded my blender situation. And I was excited to try the hummus recipe again, this time using the basic, no add-ins version. I also cooked my own chick peas for a really great result.
As before, starting with half of the chick peas and only half of the olive oil in the blender, there's no way to get things going, even with my new and improved blender. It's just too dry. You need more liquid at the beginning. So I added most of the oil in part one, and then part two went off without a hitch!
Blender hummus IS super creamy! And delicious. I added extra lemon juice this time, and a fair amount of seasoning, in the form of salt, pepper, and cumin, and I think my hummus is pretty irreproachable!
But we'll see what the cousins think tomorrow.... For now:
SFO: 10
P.S. I just finished my master spread sheet for this project, and it revealed more faulty math!! It is now my belief that the total number of recipes for me to complete is... 313. Which gives me a little more scheduling wiggle room. Phew.
Olive Hummus
Off to a rocky start...
Here we have one of several hummus variations that I'll be making over the next year. Now, I'm no stranger to hummus. I've made it before, using various recipes calling for different proportions of the same ingredients. And my conclusion is, it's pretty hard to make a terrible hummus.
Isa and Terry* claim that the secret to really creamy hummus is to make it in a blender vs. food processor. Now, I've tried to put similar concoctions in my blender, and it's always a recipe for failure: a thick sludge clogs the blades while four inches of ingredients perch undisturbed above.
But I was so intrigued by this claim that I ignored my inner voice of reason and needlessly dirtied my (clearly subpar) blender. Once I moved the festivities to the tried and true food processor, everything went quite creamily. (At least creamily enough for me, I&T.)
I'm happy to report, the recipe (sans blender) is sound. I used two medium-sized cloves of garlic, and for me, that's plenty. (Three would be overkill.) If I weren't adding olives, I might have amped up the lemon presence, but knowing that another flavor was going to take center stage, the lemon quotient was just right. The olives get pulsed in once the hummus is completely pureed, which is nice because they're chunky vs. invisible. I went with green ones, as you can see.
SFO: 10
(Who doesn't love hummus? If you have friends who are scared of it, it can only mean that they have food texture issues, which I refuse to acknowledge on the SFO scale.)
Pasta e Fagioli
This is not what I think of when I think of Pasta e Fagioli. For me, that name conjures up something really soupy and vegetable-y. I would describe this more like: Pasta with Tomatoes and White Beans.
That said, it is simple, easy, and delicious, and it comes together fast. My tomatoes were pretty watery, so it took about 30 minutes to thicken the sauce, longer than I&T's suggested 20 minutes. I used ditalini pasta and cannellini beans, both well-chosen, I think.
It's a very comfort-food-y flavor profile: pasta, tomatoes, garlic, oregano, thyme, plus beans. Classic and fail-safe.
My friend Alvin arrived too hungry to weigh in on the SFO of this recipe at first. But after getting through serving #1, he felt he was able to bring some objectivity to serving #2. (Serving #2 is always a good sign....) The "King of Pants" deemed it delicious, even for meat eaters, which I'll interpret as an SFO 10. I almost took a point off for the presence of whole beans, because there are still people out there with bean-o-phobia. (I was one.) But then I decided that beans are pretty mainstream now, and everyone needs to get over it
SFO: 10
*FYI, from this point on, Isa and Terry will be referred to as I&T.
I didn't have rice milk on hand, but I did have coconut milk (not the canned Thai kind but rather the soy milk kind) which acquitted itself nicely. 
